The following RTF strings cause errors in the Rhapsody REST server and will therefore cause RPE to hang:
String that begin with a bold character (which seems to mean that if you flush your RTF using a richtext box (microsoft recomended way and maybe part of the way RPE processes RTF into XHTML), you maintain an opening bold tag, but no closing tag making the REST server report an error and fall over.
Strings that have control characters in them (\u0001, \u0002, \u0003) appeared in my rhapsody descriptions.
strings like like <this thing here> are reported as errors, because angle brackets aren't escaped for some reason. That string in a description box will give you an attribute thing for element this should be followed by an = sign type error
Something like this is reported as fixed in Rhapsody 8.0.4, but at least the first two issues are still present in 8.0.4, didn't try the angle bracket thing, but the issue was in Rhapsody 8.0.3
This is the element that always breaks the REST server: - <rhp:descriptionXHTML>
I have raised an error report as it was driving me slightly bonkers, but wondered if anyone else has come across this issue.